


Fantastic Piece of Clickbait

by Sharksdontsleep



Category: People of Earth (TV 2016)
Genre: Alien Cultural Differences, Alien Planet, Aliens, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Season/Series 02, reptilians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-13 19:31:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12990990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sharksdontsleep/pseuds/Sharksdontsleep
Summary: Ozzie isn’t dead. If the past year has taught him anything, it’s to trust his gut - no matter how strange or twisted the situation - and his gut says he’s not dead, so he’s probably not dead.Or, Walsh and Ozzie go to Reptilia.





	Fantastic Piece of Clickbait

**Author's Note:**

  * For [abstractconcept](https://archiveofourown.org/users/abstractconcept/gifts).



> Hi, abstract concept!  
> Thank you so much for your latitude in your letter! This was a lot of fun to write and I hope as much fun to read. Happy Yuletide!
> 
> Thank you to BT for the swift and thoughtful beta!

Ozzie isn’t dead. If the past year has taught him anything, it’s to trust his gut - no matter how strange or twisted the situation - and his gut says he’s not dead, so he’s probably not dead.

Which makes the fact that he can’t seem to move a problem. 

‘Wiggle your left toe,’ he thinks. His toe doesn’t comply. OK, let’s try something easier. He tries to move his eyes from left to right, but they remain fixed on the ceiling above him, featureless enough that it takes him a minute to realize that he’s not blind, his vision whited out. 

“It’ll take awhile to get used to,” comes a voice - _Walsh’s_ \- and at least his ears are still working. “Humans really have limited visual perception. And only two eyes. That was a trip, the first few weeks, trying to see with ol’ number three covered up.”

Ozzie isn’t dead. But he suddenly has a lot of questions. Like, for one, where he is. Why he’s there. What Walsh is doing there. And why he feels ... scaly? 

“We brought you back,” Walsh says. “There were - there were some complications.”

Ozzie’s brain seems to lurch at that - _complications?_ Complications in his life include being taken to an alien ship as a child and meeting the chief complication in his life, who is standing near him like exhibit A in a courtroom drama about Ozzie’s inevitable breakdown. Also, he might be dead and more importantly, he can’t move and - 

“We, uh, had to sedate you,” Walsh says. “The transfer can be - I’ve been told it’s traumatic. But it should be wearing off right about …”

There’s a chime, and Ozzie sees a green wrist with a FitBit watch come into view and, oh, one of the reasons he couldn’t move was because he was strapped down. There’s a click, and then the sound of Velcro being un-Velcroed and he can move now, his arms, his mutinous feet, and he’s -

“I’m green,” Ozzie says. “Holy shit, I’m a Reptilian. What the fuck? Walsh, what the actual fuck?”

“It’s temporary, if that’s a consolation. Just until we get your other body up and running. Think of it like a vacation home.”

Sitting up, carefully, because his new body is stiff, and Ozzie hasn’t exactly counted his ribs, but he has a sense that there are _more_ of them than there used to be, a suspicion he confirms when he runs his hands down his sides, and there are ridges far below where his human ribcage would be, because he woke up, on a ship - probably - in a different body, and he’s kind of freaking the hell out. 

“Walsh, this isn’t a timeshare in the Hamptons,” he says, because sarcasm is the last resort of the truly panicked and because he finds it’s best to speak to Walsh in cultural touchstones he’s familiar with, especially in times of crisis. “It’s my body.” 

His pulse throbs in his temples, not a steady beat, but a one-two like a bongo, and why is his blood all of a sudden exhibiting the same lack of clear rhythm as a Sunday afternoon hippie drum circle?

“You have three hearts now,” Walsh says. “That and the vision thing’ll take some getting used to.”

The vision thing turns out to be that he can see heat, a faint flickering aura around Walsh, moving like the gas flame of a stove, reds and yellows, the occasional flash of blue. It’s dizzying, at first, when he tries to stand, and Walsh loops an arm around him, under his shoulders, and helps him collapse in a nearby chair that’s flickering the same colors. 

“Heat therapy,” Walsh says, and it radiates into Ozzie’s back and legs and - 

“Do I have a tail?” Ozzie asks. 

“Maybe?” Walsh says, and he looks like he genuinely doesn’t know, though it’s harder for Ozzie to tell now that he’s not wearing his human mask. “I didn’t check when we decided to - this was sort of a last resort. You’d begun to deteriorate and ...” 

Walsh trails off, and normally Ozzie would press him on it, but the heat feels good against him, and his eyelids start to rise and droop and shutter - there’s a third one, because of fucking course there is - and it’s possible the sedatives they had him on hadn’t worn off entirely. “Oh,” he says, and then, “What ship am I on?” Because if he’s on a ship, he deserves to know which one.

“You’re not on a ship, Ozzie,” Walsh says. “You’re on my home world.” And that’s the last thing Ozzie hears before he drifts back to sleep.

 

When he wakes up later, he’s cold - colder than he remembers being in a long time, and he’d been spending his time recently bicycling in upstate New York. In the winter. His teeth don’t chatter, because whatever response his new body has to cold, it’s not that. His fingers feel numb, though, and he tucks them under himself. He’s in a different room, in a different bed, and the light coming through the window is purple.

Walsh is asleep next to him, sitting up in a chair. He’d known that Walsh sleeps - or maybe he didn’t know that, but he’d assumed - but he’d also assumed it would be the same way Walsh did everything else: pointedly; expensively; like sleeping was something he learned how to do as part of a weekend course on high-end vodkas. 

Instead, Walsh issues a high nasal whine, though his mouth is closed, and Ozzie didn’t think of Reptilians as being capable of snoring, but that’s what Walsh is doing. Aliens snore, Ozzie thinks and then has the second, horrifying thought that he’s the one from another planet, having taken over something else’s - someone else’s - body. He’s the alien here. Fuck. 

That’s when the heating system kicks on, or something happens, and the bed he’s on starts glowing or moving or moving and glowing. It conforms around his body, cradling him, and this is way better than the magic fingers setting on his hotel bed back in Beacon. He sighs into it, loud enough to wake Walsh up. 

He jerks awake, eyes slitting open and it’s weird seeing as he actually is, yellow irises and narrow pupils, especially when he says, “Feeling better?” in his normal voice. 

“Yeah,” Ozzie says, because he is - still tired, but less like he’d been put through a ringer - and pleasantly warm on his island of a bed. He curls his toes, and huh, there are only four of them that he can feel, two sets of two, with a divide in the middle like a Vulcan salute. A glance at his hands shows five fingers, still, thumb in the right orientation, opposing his other digits. Small favors.

“You’re probably pretty hungry,” Walsh says, and there’s a strange smell in the air like fried dough and burnt rubber. “It took a couple tries, but the replicator made hush puppies. Well, they taste a little like radishes, but close enough.”

There’s a plate of them, sitting on a small table next to Ozzie’s bed. Like that makes any kind of sense, but, Ozzie supposes it doesn’t make any less sense than anything else in his life. Besides there’s some kind of spicy mayo with them that’s actually pretty good, though when he mentions it Walsh corrects him to ‘aioli’ because of course he does. 

He’s feeling warm and fed and generally less freaked out than he probably should be, on an alien planet and in someone else’s body. 

“Better?” Walsh asks. 

“Yeah,” Ozzie says. He feels warm and heavy, but less tired, and the purple light from the window has gotten brighter, so maybe it’s actually morning. If they have morning on this planet. “Where are we?”

“My home world,” Walsh says. “It, uh, translates into ‘Reptilia’, I guess.” 

“That’s a dumb name,” Ozzie says. “We didn’t name Earth ‘Humana.’ But I meant more specifically. Like, where on Reptilia are we? And I thought the other Reptilians were trying to, you know, kill you.”

“It’s a safe house,” Walsh says. “We’re pretty remote. They’re looking for me on Earth, so I figured the last place they’d look would be Reptilia. Plus, the view is pretty spectacular. Come see.” 

Ozzie hadn’t tested his new legs out yet, or at least, not for very long, and he turns to climb out of bed, placing his feet on the floor, which is warm and slightly yielding. Reptilia, or at least Jonathan Walsh’s part of it, seems pretty big on comfort. 

It also seems pretty big on gravity, because when he tries to stand upright, it feels like he has a sandbag on each shoulder, and it takes conscious effort not to crumple to the floor. “Fuck,” he says, because it feels like he’s trying to walk through water, the effort of it exhausting. 

Walsh moves like he’s going to help - to put an arm out or offer to carry Ozzie - but the worst Ozzie’ll do is hit the soft floor, and so he shakes his head.

By the time he reaches the window, he feels like he should be out of breath, but his lungs can hold more air than they did previously - if they’re even breathing oxygen and not whatever gas dissolves into acid blood here, and wow, the fact that Ozzie probably should have paid more attention to Richard’s weird biology lessons is among the more surprising things of his year. 

There’s a sill, and he leans forward, gripping it, his tail - and he definitely has a tail - acting as a counterweight. 

The window has some kind of filter on, because it dampens the light, casting the sky in a deep indigo. There are two suns, one high overhead and the other behind a set of mountains. He’s expecting to see trees, familiar plant life, like an upstate New York forest might have gotten transported along with him, but instead the whole scene is, well, alien.

Beyond the mountains, which are sparsely tufted by some kind of Seussian-looking thing - something pink and hairy that he can’t quite bring himself to call plants - is a wide flat plain, a sulfuric yellow river flowing through it. It’s strange, and strangely beautiful, especially when the mountain rumbles, rocks skidding down it and - 

“What the fuck is that?” Ozzie yells, jumping back, and Walsh laughs. 

“It’s a … it translates to ‘moving mountain,’ I guess. Or ‘rock breather.’ They’re harmless, unless of course you’re on one when they decide to get up and move. But they don’t do that for, like, a few thousand years.”

“And you just live here with that?” 

“Don’t people live on the Yellowstone super-volcano?” Walsh says, and his smile is different, now that he doesn’t really have lips; it should be more predatory, but it’s less so. Ozzie wonders if his looks the same.

Standing has become more of an effort, and he sits on a bench next to the window, which also is warm and padded-feeling, and he’s beginning to sense a theme in Reptilian interior design. He looks down at himself, taking his first real look at himself, and it’s bizarre, looking at someone else’s body, and it occurs to him that he should be freaking out more than he is - should be freaking the hell out, screaming at the top of his newly increased lung capacity, really making a racket - and he isn’t. 

“I should be freaking out,” he says. “Did you _drug_ me?”

“Uh,” Walsh says.

“You _drugged_ me?” Ozzie says. “ _Again_?” And he shouldn’t that surprised, because he’d been feeling calm, not quite good weed calm, but definitely Ativan calm, something artificial pasted over his constant sense of underlying panic. 

“Not exactly?” Walsh says. “It’s probably an after-effect of the transfer. We don’t know a lot about - you were the first time anyone had tried a human-to-Reptilian consciousness transplant. And it was under field conditions so I’m not sure … it might be the sedatives, but it might not be.”

He goes over to a video screen and makes a complicated set of movements with his hand, queuing up what looks like a set of, well, alien script, that then seems to rearrange and resolve itself into legible text. 

Ozzie’s brain knows it’s not English, but it reads like English, and it’s another thing to add to the seemingly endless list of shit that should be, but isn’t, breaking his entire brain. 

The text appears to be something about a medical procedure, and it’s a little hard to follow, not just because the translation from Reptilian to English isn’t exact, but also because Ozzie went to journalism school and not medical school, much less alien medical school. It does get into some of the outcomes of various species transfers - and there’s a chart that projects out from the screen mapping transfers of Reptilian to Gray and Gray to Human, and so on, with hypotheticals connected by dashed lines. 

There’s another chart comparing differences in human and Reptilian physiology, including notes about differences in temperament and reactions to stress. He reads it, twice to be sure.

“Wait, so you’re saying I’m not losing my shit because Reptilians are both literally and figuratively cold-blooded?” 

“My first few years on Earth,” Walsh says. “It took some time getting used to you guys screaming your heads off all the time about everything.” 

“We’re not that bad,” Ozzie says, but then he thinks about the group - thinks about himself the first time he’d seen Walsh without the mask. “OK, maybe we are, but in fairness, you are infiltrating major positions of power in an attempt to bring about a full-scale invasion through -”

Walsh holds up a hand - and Ozzie considers if it’s still a hand: A forelimb? - “I know, Ozzie.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, a gesture that Ozzie had always thought of as uniquely human, but apparently not. “I know.”

“What’re we doing here, then?” Ozzie says, gesturing with his new alien hand around to his new alien environment.

“Waiting,” Walsh says. “For your body and for - well, we’ll see.” 

 

Their safe house - and if Ozzie really considers it, it’s a cabin, albeit an alien cabin with a strange, non-Euclidean floor plan and a bathroom that’s mostly steam vents and hot rocks for lying around on - is actually pretty sweet. Everything is warm and heated and slightly pliant, and once he etches small markers into the walls to guide his way around, he doesn’t get lost. 

So it’s a pretty sweet setup - for what’s basically forced detention on an alien planet. 

He hasn’t spent much time with Walsh in tight quarters - his ship had felt enormous when Ozzie was a kid - but it seems like it’s making Walsh lose it as well. He seems - maybe antsy isn’t the correct word, but it’s the word that Ozzie thinks of looking at him. Nervous. Checking corners, in the rooms that have them. Like another mysterious ‘Russian’ agent will jump out and shoot at them. 

He cooks, which surprises Ozzie, because the replicator makes pretty accurate Earth foods - at least they look like Earth foods, but sometimes taste like salmon and nutmeg, or passion fruit and kimchi. But instead he spends time fiddling with it, requesting more specific ingredients that either come out as perfect-looking imitations or blobs of congealing, slightly smoldering protein. 

Ozzie, for his part, lies around like a lizard on a hot rock and reads his way through the Reptilian novels stored on the cabin’s local server. Reptilians are, unsurprisingly, big on political intrigue and machinations and short on compelling emotional arcs. And weirdly into very long drawn-out scenes describing handholding in a strange amount of detail. Still, there’s not much else to do, so he reads. 

It’s one of the laziest times of his life, if he’s really honest, and he’s less careful with his borrowed body than he would be with his own, to the point that Walsh tosses some kind of cream at him and tells him to rub it on the spots where he’s molting. It smells both botanical and like no plant he’s ever smelled, but it smoothes over his dry patches. 

Walsh is frustratingly nonspecific as to how long his body - his human body - will take to repair; or even where it is. For the first few days, Ozzie expected to stumble into a room to find himself, his body, hooked to machines, a ventilator going like bellows, breathing life into him. He doesn’t, of course. 

It’s hard to tell the passage of days with two suns, one of which seems to rise and set at inconsistent intervals, but Ozzie thinks it’s been about two weeks cooped up before he actually loses it.

It’s a typical afternoon: Ozzie wakes up when Sun 1, the predictable constant Sun that he thinks of as Gina, is rising. He saunas off and then scrubs down with a vigorous brush that gets rid of most of his, ew, peeling skin flakes, rubbing balm on the rest. The book he’s reading is apparently a Reptilian classic, and Ozzie can appreciate it in a ‘A Song of Ice And Fire’ kind of way, even if he has a hard time keeping the names straight, which he complains about to Walsh.

“See that diacritical mark there?” Walsh says. “That denotes a male, a second son, being addressed by a superior who’s not a relative.”

It occurs to Ozzie that he doesn’t actually know Walsh’s real name - that it couldn’t be _Jonathan_. That they must have done recon on names for Earth babies born the same year Walsh was. 

“What’s your name?” Ozzie asks. “I mean, your Reptilian name?”

“It’s, uh -” and it’s hard to read Walsh’s expressions - was always kind of hard, behind the mask of tech billionaire philanthropist Pisces - but harder now that he doesn’t have his human mask on. If Walsh had to guess, though, he sounds uncomfortable. Apologetic, even. “It’s easier to understand if I write it out.” 

He presses on the surface of a table that Ozzie had assumed was just a table, but it flickers on in a screen. He prompts something that opens a blank screen and he traces a hand over it, assembling letters that eventually resolve into a name. Unlike most words, whatever Reptilian to English translator Ozzie has going on doesn’t work on names, and so it flickers between a set of alien script, some of it appearing to pop above the screen into three dimensions and trying to make a comprehensible set of English letters. 

“There,” he says. 

“How am I supposed to say that?” Ozzie asks.

“I’m, uh, not sure you can,” Walsh says. “Even with the extra palette. Not sure anything on Earth could. Except maybe dolphins. Funny story: When we first wanted to invade Earth, we spent a long time watching dolphin societies, because that’s what our scanners picked up as ‘intelligent life.’”

“I mean,” Ozzie says, “you’re not wrong.” He leans over, pointing to the various marking that annotate the name Walsh wrote. “You’re a third son?”

“Close,” Walsh says. “I’m the fifth son of a third son. Basically, a way of saying ‘irrelevant.’ Literally, it means my mother could have consumed me at birth for nutrients and not been found guilty of a crime.”

“I don’t know if I say this enough,” Ozzie says. “But ew.”

“This marking means that I graduated ‘higher than expected’ from my secondary coursework. And this one means I achieved a rank beyond my birth standing in the - I guess it’s like the civil service? Reptilian spy corps?”

“So, your name is ‘your mom could have eaten you, smarter than expected, not a total fuckup?’”

“Yeah,” Walsh says. “When you put it like that, I kind of like ‘Jonathan’ better.”

He smiles, and it’s so _alien_ to see him like this that Ozzie wishes he had his skin back on, his human skin, he and Walsh both. That they were back on Earth with Ozzie’s friends. That none of this had happened because he’s _dead_ and in someone else’s body and -

It turns out it’s hard to hyperventilate with a large lung capacity and a windpipe that allows for circular breathing, but Ozzie is nothing if not determined and there are wheezing noises, the flap at the back of his throat clicking, and Walsh has his hands on Ozzie’s face. 

Instead of the soft-handed feel of someone with an assistant whose sole job is to manage his dry-cleaning, they feel a little rough, divisions between the scales, and Ozzie didn’t even like Earth that much. It was mostly a shitty place, full of deeply messed up people, himself included, but he wants to go back, possibly more than anything he’s wanted before, a deep tug right below his new ribs. 

And Walsh is who’s keeping him here.

“Let me fucking go,” Ozzie says, and Walsh drops his hands. “Let me go,” he says again, and he wants out of this stupid house and off this stupid planet, and he makes a break for it, down a hallway, any hallway, in search of an exterior door.

He doesn’t find one, but at least the windows respond to him, and he’d just expects one to push open when he’d presses it, but instead it dissolves - or doesn’t, really, but becomes immaterial enough to step through and then he’s outside. 

It’s _hot_ outside, hotter than he was expecting, and he doesn’t have sweat glands - which probably explains why Walsh always seemed inhumanly dry - but his skin tightens. He’d been to Phoenix once, in August, had stood on a treeless road and watched the waves of heat rise up from the asphalt and it feels like that, but so much worse.

And then the ground shakes.

The Seussian plants vibrate minutely, and the house, now that Ozzie’s standing outside it, sort of shifts and wobbles; the soft, flexible construction of it making sense now, because it adjusts to the movement. 

It should be frightening - Ozzie’s from the East Coast and has a healthy fear of earthquakes - but it’s not. Or maybe that’s just the Reptilian mind juice soothing him and fuck, fuck this entire planet. Fuck it right in its ear. Or the canals that serve as ears in Reptilian heads. 

There’s a sound from the window, and then Walsh is out too. “Nice day,” he says. “A little cold out, but nice.”

It occurs to Ozzie that he’d been keeping the house cold - had kept his office cold, the various houses and condos and residences cold - out of courtesy to humans. That, or his skin suit is insulated. Or possibly both. 

“You’re sick of being trapped here,” Walsh says, and Ozzie isn’t sure if he means on Reptilia or in this strange body. 

“Yeah,” he says, because he is. He doesn’t get a chance to say anything else, because an alarm goes off, a high pitched whine accompanied by fluctuating flares of heat. He assumes it’s some kind of response to tectonic movement - or rock breather movement or something else disturbing - except Walsh looks concerned.

“Proximity sensors,” he says. “Could be nothing. But … ” He phases back through the window, gesturing for Ozzie to follow, and from there it’s a scramble as Walsh gets two bags and tosses one at Ozzie, as he follows Walsh through a twisting set of hallways, floors rising and descending, through a door Ozzie hasn’t seen before and then out to what looks like, well, a spaceship. 

It’s closer to a shuttle, small and with a windshield that wraps around three-quarters of it, and a set of what looks like thrusters. Inside, Walsh cues up a video screen that displays commands on a 3D console, manipulating various dials and switches until Ozzie can feel the engines wake, and then they’re up in the air. 

He’s pressed back against an unsurprisingly pliant chair, and he never thought he’d be nostalgic for uncomfortable airline seats, but he is, a little. Outside, he gets a better look at the landscape. Below, it’s clear it’s geologically active - or biologically active - sets of rock-breathers nested against one another, shifting slowly but perceptibly - and it’d be beautiful if it weren’t so terrifying, an entire planet covered with living mountains. And whoever or whatever’s chasing them.

Once they hit altitude, Walsh punches in coordinates and then puts the ship into some kind of autopilot. 

“Where are we going?” Ozzie asks, because if it’s to yet another planet, Ozzie is owed at the very least a destination. 

“The capital,” Walsh says. “To my parents’ house.”

It’s a surprisingly short flight - either the ship is going much faster than Ozzie perceives or they hadn’t been that far away from the rest of Reptilian civilization. He wonders if distances are constant things, or if those change too with the movements of the mountains, though he supposes Earth has the same problem, but on a longer timescale. Not for the first time, he wishes he were high. 

They alight on a helipad, or a landing pad - whatever you call a place to put a spaceship down. It’s in a field, a low covering of what looks like purple moss everywhere, which is springy under his feet. Walsh does something with his hand, and the ship goes invisible or mirrored because of course it has a cloaking device. Of fucking course. 

Walsh’s parent’s house isn’t particularly impressive, at least not from the outside; a squat building lined with panels of tinted glass, not like the estate he’d pictured Walsh being raised on, something with tennis courts or whatever Reptilians played instead.

“C’mon,” Walsh says. 

“Won’t your parents, like, call the Reptilian police or whatever?”

“They’re dead,” Walsh says, casually enough that Ozzie knows he’s not being casual at all. “The house is probably a wreck.”

It’s not a wreck inside, but it’s unlived in, a fine layer of what looks like ash covering everything. Walsh flicks on the ventilation system, which whirs to life, pulling in debris - tufts of pink and purple plant matter, scales, ash, all sucked away.

“Won’t they come looking for you here, whoever’s chasing us?” 

“If they survive,” Walsh says. “It’s a big ‘if.’ The safe-house was rigged to implode, something big enough to really wake the mountain.”

“If I haven’t said it enough, this place is kind of wild.”

“Yeah,” Walsh says. “We’re not staying here long, anyway.” The house seems to be laid out in the same twisting style as where they were before, and Ozzie follows, mostly because he doesn’t know what else to do.

They come to what he recognizes as a bathroom, and Walsh produces what looks like a mask and gloves. “Help me with these,” he says, handing them, and small bottle of adhesive, to Ozzie.

Ozzie wasn’t a theater kid. Hell, Ozzie hadn’t been cool enough to be a theater kid; in the pecking order of high school, the theater kids looked down on the newspaper kids and the newspaper kids looked down on the yearbook kids. So, he doesn’t have much experience applying masks or prosthetics.

Walsh does, and he instructs Ozzie to paint the adhesive around the edges of his face, across the bridge of his flattened nose, under his chin. Ozzie can feel him, and he’s warm, of course, sitting on a heated seat, can feel his body heat radiate and hear the drumbeat of his pulse. Or maybe that’s his own. And they’ve been this close before, but mostly Ozzie was in mortal danger and now, they’re not and there’s a flicker in Walsh’s eyes that Ozzie doesn’t know how to process. 

Instead, he helps Walsh apply another skin over his, a mask, pull on and secure gloves with a different scale pattern on the palms. He probably doesn’t need to run his fingers over them, but he doesn’t quite trust the glue to keep them secure. So he trails his index and middle fingers over them, pressing any place that feels at all loose. Walsh’s breathing has picked up, and his palms are warm, even through the second layer.

“Thank you,” he says, hoarsely, after a minute, and Ozzie leans back on his heels. 

“Where to next?” Ozzie asks. 

“Time to hide in plain sight.”

Ozzie had imagined the Reptilian capital like something out of a movie - all chrome and glass and sharply edged, buildings like rocket ships, something gleaming and sterile, Walsh’s Manhattan condo writ large. 

Instead, it’s build to the same design as the other houses he’s seen, albeit on a much grander scale - a dizzying set of curves and mirrors, buildings that descend and ascend and shimmer vaguely with heat. Ships and lighter vehicles whir between them and the whole effect is utterly utterly alien. 

One building towers above the rest, straight where the others bend, its lines screaming importance. On top a watchtower that looks like an eye and it’d be a shitty Lord of the Rings rip-off if it didn’t glow a bright alien purple. “Um,” Ozzie says. 

“Home sweet home,” Walsh replies. “I have a place.”

His place turns out to be a bolthole of an apartment, smaller than his office in New York and pedestrian in its accoutrements. Walsh activates a video screen, and there’s an image of their safehouse smoldering, reports of renewed mountain activity. None of the broadcasters mention a triggered implosion, but it’s distressing enough seeing the place he’d spent the past few weeks on fire, hot blues and purples mixed with cooler tongues of red and orange flame. 

“Well,” Walsh says. “Guess I don’t need to worry about getting rid of the evidence.”

“You think whoever was looking for us is in there.”

Walsh shakes his head. “No mention of bodies - though if they found them and decided not to report, that’d also tell us something. For now, we wait.”

“Isn’t that what we’ve been doing?” Ozzie says. “We hide and we run, and nothing seems to change.”

Walsh looks sobered by this, or his new face does, and he says, “Give me a little more time, Ozzie. Just. It’s been kind of a crazy day.”

“Yeah,” Ozzie says, because what else can he say?

Walsh cooks dinner, not from the replicator and not Earth foods either. It’s something like bread topped with something like vegetables and cheese, but Ozzie has never had purple bread before, or cheese that pulsates a little when Walsh rubs his hands over it. He hasn’t taken off his new face, his new hands remain, and if he’s a little less standoffish than usual, Ozzie doesn’t mention it. 

Reptilians are pretty intense about personal space. From one of the apartment’s windows - which Ozzie had been avoiding until Walsh pointed out it was a screen co-opted by an advertisement for some kind of scale-cream and so no one could see in - he has a good view of them lining up around a transport stop, as evenly spaced as newsprint letters and seemingly uninterested in one another.

Walsh calls him over, offers a spoonful of something that should be liquid except it’s hovering slightly, and when he tastes it, tastes like chipotle and green grapes. 

“It’s good,” Ozzie says, and the only thing he’ll probably miss about his new body is the third palette which has taste receptors, and his third eye, which can see the warmth around the heating element Walsh is using to cook. And around Walsh too.

Some of whatever it is must have smeared on his mouth, because Walsh reaches forward, dragging the edge of a finger over Ozzie’s lower lip. “You had some ...” Walsh says, belatedly, and then turns back to preparing what he’ll later try to describe as ‘bruschetta,’ but pronounced with a hard ‘k’ as they eat.

“Pretty sure cheese doesn’t undulate like that,” Ozzie says, and helps himself to more. 

Walsh smiles back. Maybe it’s that he’s wearing a mask over his real face - or maybe it’s just that they’re sitting closer than they have since that day, in the woods, before that flash of light and Ozzie -

“Are you OK?” Walsh asks, because Ozzie is definitely not having a panic attack, not in this humble little apartment on an alien planet, Walsh’s feet under his chair, not when he should feel safe but all he feels is _trapped_ , in this body, on this planet, staring at his only friend, who’s wearing a stranger’s face and who thinks being funny about appetizers is the best way to - 

“No,” Ozzie says, pushing his chair back, which doesn’t even do a satisfying stutter against the floor. “I don’t think I am.”

“Oh,” Walsh says. “Are you - are you sick?”

“I wouldn’t even -” Ozzie begins. “No, I’m not sick, Walsh, unless you’re asking about a more metaphorical sickness, in which case, yes, yes, I am sick.”

“You’re metaphorically sick?”

“I’m sick of this damn planet,” Ozzie says. “And of your half-answers and non-answers. I miss my parents. I miss Earth and my stupid fixed gear and my pour-over coffee. I miss the group - fuck, I even miss Richard and Richard is _annoying_.” He feels like yelling, feels like smacking his stupid Reptilian hand against the stupid Reptilian wall, which of course, ripples and doesn’t give him the satisfaction of a real thwack. “Just fucking tell me when we’re getting the hell out of here.”

“I thought you said you trusted me,” Walsh says.

“Trusted you to tell the truth!” Ozzie says. “Not to decide how everything in my life was supposed to be. That’s not what trust is, Walsh. ” 

“Oh,” Walsh says, like this is new information to him, and maybe it is, but Ozzie is hundred percent, a thousand percent, a million percent done with him right now. “I want my body back. Where is it?”

“Uh,” Walsh says.

“Where is it, Walsh?”

“I don’t know, exactly. On a ship in orbit. I thought it’d be better to hide you in something with no fixed position.” He pinches the bridge of his Reptilian nose. “So, I don’t know where you are or when you’ll be ready to -” 

“Of course you don’t,” Ozzie snaps. “I thought we were past this, but I’m here and you won’t _tell_ me anything.”

“It’s to protect you,” Walsh says.

“I’m not a fucking child anymore,” Ozzie says. “I haven’t been for a long time.”

“I know,” Walsh says. “I _know_. It’s hard for me to separate - you now, and you then, and I’m sorry - none of this is fair to you. Nothing I’ve done is fair to you, and you never asked for any of this.”

“I didn’t,” Ozzie says. “But I’m asking now. Just _tell_ me what’s going on. Be honest with me. Don’t treat me like - I’m not someone you have to protect.” 

Walsh laughs, that laugh of his where he knows it’s not funny at all. “I don’t know who I am if I’m not protecting you. I just wanted to keep you safe. I fucked up so much and I thought, well, it doesn’t matter, if Ozzie is safe.”

“But I’m not safe,” Ozzie says. “I’m in danger, and it’s more dangerous not to know than to know.”

“You’re right,” Walsh says. “I haven’t been fair to you. I watched you die. It’s been fucking me up - you, lying there, dead, because of me. I wanted to keep you safe, and I guess I screwed up doing that too. Safe doesn’t matter if you’re not happy.” He averts his eyes, studying the table between them. 

Ozzie wants to reach out, to press his palm to the smooth dry scales of Walsh’s, to … he doesn’t know. Something that conveys comfort. He tries to recall if there were anything in any of the novels he’d read - anything that indicates how Reptilians comfort one another. But there isn’t and that itself is telling. 

“For what it’s worth,” Ozzie says. “I know you’re trying.” 

“I am,” Walsh says. 

“So,” Ozzie says, and he does reach out his hand to where Walsh’s is resting, dragging two fingers down his dry palm, making Walsh suck in a breath. “Let’s try together.”

 

Of course, trying apparently means that they’re trying to break into the building - the one with the giant purple eye that basically screams, “Most important Reptilian building on Reptilia!” - to get some kind of decrypter thing that will let them jump Walsh’s ship off-planet and up into orbit where Ozzie’s body apparently is. 

“I’ve been trying to crack it since we’ve been here,” Walsh admits. “I didn’t want you to worry.” 

“You know my job on Earth was getting information from people who didn’t want to give it to me,” Ozzie says. “Wait, that makes me sound like a spy. I mean, I was also great at looking through microfiche.” 

“I don’t know what that is,” Walsh says. “But we need to get to that building, get into it, retrieve the passcode and then use it to get the hell off world.” 

“How did we get _on_ here, if now we can’t leave?” 

“Uh, we kind of, um, there was a crash. We crashed. I had you in this - like a Tupperware? But for your mind?” He makes a gesture, holding his hands apart as if Ozzie isn’t familiar with the concept of plastic food storage containers instead of the the concept of _consciousness transference_.

“How did we ever think that Reptilians were going to conquer the planet?” Ozzie says, but he laughs, and reviews the building schematics that Walsh has displayed on the video screen. 

Now that they’re actually talking to one another, time seems to move much faster, though when Ozzie mentions it, Walsh mentions that this is the time of year when one of the suns accelerates. Which is - Ozzie’s not an astrophysicist, but that feels wrong.

Walsh, it seems, still has friends or at least contacts on Reptilia, and he goes out, wearing his false face and hands, and comes back with data chips that he queues up, schematics, schedules, intel that he must have paid dearly for, though Ozzie has no idea what the exchange rate between Earth money and Reptilian money might be. 

He doesn’t send Ozzie out - Ozzie’s voice may be filtered through a universal translator, so he’s speaking Reptilian, but apparently not what Walsh considers _good_ Reptilian. 

“You sound like someone speaking Google-translate Reptilian,” Walsh says. 

“What’re the odds that someone hears me say something odd and says, ‘oh, I bet he’s not Reptilian! I bet he’s a human from another world transferred into a Reptilian body!’”

“Wasn’t one of your group obsessed with Reptilians?” Walsh asks, but he’s got that smile on, the one that doesn’t make Ozzie want to breathe into a paper bag with anxiety, which, in and of itself makes Ozzie want to breathe into a paper bag with anxiety. If there were paper bags on Reptilia. Or paper. 

“Point,” Ozzie says. “But it turns out there was an elaborate conspiracy to abduct humans and take over the planet.”

Walsh looks like he actually might apologize, mouth open and hand raised, but he’s been apologizing at least once a day, generally in the morning, when he hands Ozzie something that isn’t pour-over coffee with a ‘sorry,’ as if that apology will make up for both the lack of high-end coffee options and literally kidnapping Ozzie as a child. 

“So,” Ozzie says, before Walsh can say anything. “Let’s get back to the whole ‘return Ozzie to his home planet and save the world plan,’ OK?”

“Yeah,” Walsh says. “Sounds good.”

They comb through data, and Ozzie looks over documents - schedules, building plans, anything that might indicate ‘secret lab where we keep all the really important data’ - but he really doesn’t know what he’s looking at. 

It doesn’t stop Walsh from enthusing over the things Ozzie points out, though. 

“That’s good,” he says, or rather “Mmmmph ghoo” because of course he’s eating. Now that he’s not a billionaire playboy Pisces Iron Man rip-off or whatever, he’s kind of disgusting. Or he would be, if he didn’t coax the replicator to make some pretty decent food. He spends most of his time in the apartment eating, researching, and wearing his Earth clothes. Out of the apartment, he dresses like a Reptilian, where the turtleneck suit is still somehow a thing. Inside, he dresses like ‘Jonathan Walsh, billionaire in plaid,’ and fusses a lot with the hood from his hoodie. 

It’s definitely not something Ozzie watches him do at all, not after they’ve been at it for hours, looking over plans, though the number of known unknowns about Walsh’s scheme doesn’t really seem to be decreasing at all. 

“Let me get that for you,” Ozzie says, the tenth time he does it, and reaches across the arm of his chair, across the arm of Walsh’s chair, because there’s nothing that’s meant for two Reptilians in the apartment, like a sofa - even the beds they’ve been sleeping in are the size of twin beds, smaller than what Ozzie has slept in since college. 

He adjusts how Walsh’s hood is hanging over his shirt, smoothing out wrinkles and unfolding where it’s folded over; something Walsh shouldn’t be able to feel, but apparently does, the way that Ozzie can feel him shift and relax. There’s a wave of colors, a heat signature that’s dampened by his clothing, and Ozzie doesn’t need any kind of alien translation tech to decode the way his stomach (or possibly stomachs) does a strange little flip at that. 

“Thanks,” Walsh says, belatedly, and Ozzie leans over to examine the display so that he doesn’t have to examine how he’s feeling. 

 

Walsh comes back from one of his information-collecting errands bleeding. Or rather, oozing, because it’s _acid_ and Ozzie has really no idea what to do. The fact that he should have paid attention to Richard is, again, a surprise, one that he’ll be glad to consider as soon as he gets his only friend on the planet to stop bleeding. Oozing. Whatever.

“There’s -” Walsh says, and then heaves himself onto one of the armchairs, holding his midsection. “A kit. Um, neutralize …” He slumps forward.

“Shit,” Ozzie says, because _shit_. He rifles through the bathroom, and comes up with very little that looks like it could be used to seal a wound, particularly one that’s leaking burning blood. So he shouts at the replicator to make something basic, as in non-acidic - and then shouts some more when it produces a flavorless, clear protein cube. He eventually coaxes the Reptilian equivalent of baking soda out of it, and smears a paste of it over where Walsh’s blood is burning through his skin. 

Walsh sighs, heavily enough that it must have really hurt - and it seems like a failure of evolution to make blood that can further injure you. 

Ozzie pulls on a set of thick gloves he finds under a sink and presses a clean shirt into Walsh’s bared side. The bleeding slows, though Walsh looks a bit gray behind the green of his skin, in the areas not covered by the stupid face prosthetic he wears, and Ozzie wants to tear it off him, suddenly, stupidly. 

Instead, he tells Walsh to press and keep a firm hold on where he’s bleeding. The bathroom yields disinfectant, something that looks and smells like alcohol because it probably is, and Walsh hisses a lot - not a Reptilian hiss but a noise Ozzie would probably make if he were in the same situation and hadn’t already fainted. 

“Did you get recognized?” Ozzie asks, though he has the sense that if Walsh did get recognized, he’d be dead and Ozzie would be stuck on the planet, waiting for him to come back, living without family or friends, in a body that’s not his.

Walsh shakes his head. “Fell on - there was a security fence, with, like electrified spikes. Or pulses.” He says a word that Ozzie’s brain doesn’t immediately translate, or does, but comes out as ‘electric knife pickets.’ “I got it, though. A building map that shows the secret divisions.” 

He hadn’t told Ozzie what he was after; he’d been selective about the information he’d been giving him. “I just - if they come for you,” Walsh had said before leaving. “It’s better to maintain you have no idea about how we were going to get off planet.”

“But I don’t really have a clear idea of it.”

“Exactly.”

Now, Walsh is sitting, bleeding slowed, looking victorious and self-satisfied, grin wide despite the occasional wince - that Walsh face Ozzie recognizes from before he knew his random boss was an actual alien who’d watched out for him as a kid. When he was just _Walsh_ , his name said in that tone of voice when Ozzie complained about him to various friends after work. 

It also kind of makes Ozzie want to lean in and - 

Walsh gives a long exhale, air through his teeth, and maybe the high of coming back with what he wanted and relatively not dead is wearing off. 

“Do Reptilians believe in painkillers?” Ozzie asks.

“Reptilians don’t,” Walsh says. “But I do. They’re -” he begins to get up before Ozzie puts two green fingers on his shoulder and says, “I’ll get them,” and follows Walsh’s instructions for retrieving them from one of the shelves in the bathroom.

He helps Walsh down the hall to the room he’s been sleeping in. They have to start and stop, but at least the floor and walls are pliant enough that he’s less worried about dropping him. He doesn’t, though, and instead delivers Walsh to his bed, warmth flickering over it already. 

Walsh accepts the pills - and course it’s freaking Tylenol 3, which Walsh takes double the dosage of. “This stuff makes me sleepy,” he says, already mumbling. 

He doesn’t ask Ozzie to pull up the chair beside his bed, or wait until he goes to sleep. Ozzie does, though, and watches the slow, even circularity of his breathing. 

Even with the intel Walsh found, they need an in to the building and they go on an honest-to-god stakeout, which on Reptilia means sitting two arm-distances apart on a bench near the building, trying to identify someone who’d make a good mark to follow in or steal a security badge from. 

They don’t talk, because Reptilians, in public, apparently aren’t into saying ‘hello,’ or making small talk. Ozzie never thought he’d miss the welcoming atmosphere of being a commuter in lower Manhattan, but apparently, here he is. 

Their signal for spotting a mark is to tap against the bench, but as one Reptilian walks by looking … drunk? Do they get drunk? The other Reptilians are giving it a wide berth, even wider than normal, and there’s a name digitally displayed on its uniform has diacritical marks that Ozzie thinks mean, “Mom could have eaten me.” 

He taps the bench a few times, but Walsh has turned to look at something else. He taps some more, but it’s getting kind of inconspicuous, so he reaches out and wraps his scaled hand around Walsh’s scaled wrist, high enough that it’s Walsh’s and not the prosthetic he insists on wearing.

Walsh makes a noise like ... Well, Ozzie knows what that noise is like from a human, but it’s mostly because it’s like noises made in porn, because it’s a sex noise and suddenly all of those graphic, prolonged hand-holding scenes in Reptilian novels make a lot more sense. 

“Ew,” Ozzie says, because ‘ew.’ He’d drawn himself holding Walsh’s hand as a kid - hell, Walsh had let him, and ewwwww. Ew. Not enough ew.

“It’s only if -” Walsh whispers, forcefully. “If we’re both Reptilian.” 

“People should wear, I don’t know, hand-condoms,” Ozzie says, in his normal speaking voice volume. “Or something. Not hand condoms. Gloves! Gloves. People should wear gloves.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” Walsh says. “And I’m not explaining out here.” He does take several covert pictures of the Reptilian mark that Ozzie has pointed out, though. 

They don’t manage to finish their surveillance unnoticed, because just interacting in public is strange and weird for Reptilians. One or two shoot them looks, particularly since Ozzie’s hand is still resting, apparently obscenely, on the bench near Walsh’s.

“C’mon,” Walsh says, and hustles off, fast enough that Ozzie, on his new split feet that don’t seem to be made for any real kind of locomotion other than ambling, has to hurry to keep up with him.

They take a circuitous route back to the bolthole, and it’s more of Reptilia than Ozzie has seen on either the video screen in the now-burnt safehouse or the apartment. He’d expected that an alien city would feel more, well, alien - that the idea of streets and sidewalks and stores and rushing to get places would somehow be an Earth thing, uniquely human. But it isn’t. 

The sidewalks are larger, and feel kind of squishy, but compress to a texture not unlike concrete as he puts his weight on them. The buildings don’t seem to follow Euclidean geometry - but Reptilians go and leave, carrying cups of what smells like the stuff Walsh apologizes for every morning but makes dutifully. If he squints hard enough, and mentally adds more shouting, honking, and cursing, it could be New York.

He doesn’t want to think about if they’ll ever get out of here; he has to believe they will. He’d felt stuck in Manhattan and stuck in Beacon, and he has to believe that they’ll find a way off this planet too. He doesn’t know how far back it is to Earth - when he’d asked Walsh, he started talking about spacetime and folds in the fabric of the universe, until Ozzie’d put up his hand, and Walsh said, “Like, three days, depending on if we stop for snacks.” 

Given Walsh’s eating habits of late, they were probably stopping for snacks, if there were an interplanetary rest-stop that sold fried foods. If they could get the hell off this damn planet.

 

Having a way in - and Walsh looks up the Reptilian that Ozzie had identified; he’s a nobody’s nobody, unlikely to have much in the way of clearance, but Walsh swears they just need to get in the building and figure it out from there - means that they’re really doing this. 

It’s both promising and incredibly terrifying, and Ozzie flips between the two as Walsh lays out a plan that night back in the bolthole. All three of his hearts feel like they’re crawling into his throat, a lub-dub-dub-dub against his extra ribs. He probably should be asking Walsh questions beyond the ones he is, specific logistical questions that all really collapse down to one: How are they getting back to Earth, Ozzie back in his body? 

Walsh has other concerns, though, because he walks Ozzie through the plan twice, then quizzes Ozzie on specifics until Ozzie gives what must be satisfactory answers. He sits, pinching his nose. “I just want you to promise me,” he says, “that if we get separated you’ll just take the codes. Run. Once you get back to the ship - apparently, undoing the whole mind-swap thing is easier than doing it. Earth is number three on the ‘speed destination’ settings. You’re smart. You’ll figure it out.” 

“What happens to -” Ozzie says, gesturing down to the body he’s been _living in_ for several months at this point. 

“Stick it in the cold storage on the ship,” Walsh says. “It’s - they weren’t living.”

“You _killed_ someone for this?” Ozzie says. He can’t bring himself to say ‘for me,’ but he thinks Walsh hears it. 

Walsh shrugs. “Just promise me, Ozzie. If we get separated, that you’ll take the codes and go.”

“Walsh,” Ozzie says, because he can’t promise he won’t just panic if that happens, or that they won’t both end up dead, or any of a hundred possibilities, only one of which would be his leaving while Walsh remained. His leaving Walsh. “I -”

“Promise me,” Walsh says. “Let me have this. Even if - even if you end up going back alone, I’ll know that you’re OK.” 

“I don’t want to -” Ozzie begins.

“I know I’m not supposed to want to protect you,” Walsh says. “I know. I know. It’s just that. There’s so much left for you on Earth. Rescue the group. Make a life. There’s no much for me, there or here but …” He looks down at his hands. He’s not wearing the prosthetics, and his shirt cuffs have slid down over his wrists. He looks like the Walsh Ozzie had gotten used to, gotten to know, except his hands are green and, when he looks up, he looks like he might cry. 

“OK,” Ozzie says. 

“OK?”

“I promise.”

“Good,” Walsh says. “OK, good.”

They spend the next day prepping, Walsh running Ozzie through how to address guards depending on his assumed identity, and Ozzie ends up feeling like he’s squandered his time on Reptilia, if he knows so little about their world works, their language and culture and customs. When he says this to Walsh, Walsh reminds him that they are trying to conquer and destroy Ozzie’s home planet. 

“Still,” Ozzie says. 

“Next time you’re stuck on a planet in another species’ body,” Walsh says, “you can play anthropologist.”

“Wouldn’t it be Reptil-ologist?” Ozzie asks. He enjoys Walsh’s laugh.

They don’t get drunk that night, though Ozzie kind of feels like they should - one last hurrah, maybe, or the last time he’s likely to see Walsh alive. He’s too nervous to eat much, but he does the shot of Reptilian liquor Walsh pours him, which is a shimmering blue and vibrates in his cup a disconcerting amount. It doesn’t settle his stomachs, but it does warm him from the inside, and that’s enough. 

Before they go to sleep, or rather, before Ozzie goes to lie down and stare at the ceiling and wonder if they’re going to make it to Earth or die trying, Walsh lingers in the doorway to Ozzie’s room. “You good with this plan?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Ozzie says. “We’re gonna make it.” He must sound more confident than he feels, because Walsh looks reassured. 

“Good,” he says. “Good, good. Well, I should let you get some sleep. Big day tomorrow.” And he sounds like he’s talking about some big news story dropping or a bar opening or any of the small things that made up Ozzie’s life, their life really, before. Full of bravado that, if Ozzie didn’t know him, might sound real. 

“Walsh,” Ozzie says, and he doesn’t know what to say, really. Doesn’t know if he has the words to encompass all of this - Walsh bringing him back from the dead, Walsh killing for him, Walsh maybe dying for him. Knows that, even as a writer, some things are inexpressible. 

Instead, he reaches for Walsh, and hugs him, tight, borrowed body against Walsh’s true one. 

“Whatever happens,” Walsh says, breath hitching, against his neck. “I just want - Thank you, Ozzie. Thank you.”

“You saved my life,” Ozzie says. “I should be thanking you.”

Walsh pulls back and smiles thinly at that. “Just returning the favor,” he says. “Let’s get some sleep.”

 

Their plan goes perfectly up until the moment they get caught. 

It’s almost comically easy to waylay their mark in a side alley, to leave him sedated and cuffed, stripped of his security badge. For Walsh to walk through the main entrance, and let Ozzie in one of the service doors. 

No one stops them or talks with them, not about the weather or the latest in earthquakes, or anything else, and Ozzie flashes to every scene he’s ever seen in a heist movie with the thieves on an elevator with an oblvious employee, trying to make small talk about the latest office misadventure.

Getting the codes is harder - Walsh has to do some sleight of hand with mixing up access badges, but he pulls it off and only looks like he wants to make a double-thumbs up at Ozzie once. 

The codes themselves are obtained through Walsh making frustrated, clacking noises at a computer terminal and the slow crawl of a status bar as they upload to a data chip. It’s slow and nerve-wracking and all the things Ozzie thinks a heist should be, particularly one that results in having to make a daring escape. 

And it feels hard enough that Ozzie stops worrying for a minute. Which is when when the alarms go off. 

There are alarms radiating noise and heat flares, bright at the edges of his vision, guards with stun guns, Walsh yelling “Run, run!” at him before being dragged away. 

Ozzie doesn’t, though - he feels planted in place, fixed there by his stupid feet with their stupid split toe structure, and that’s not what he should be thinking about. His brain knows that. But there’s both the wash of fear and the wash of calming neurotransmitters or whatever that let Reptilians keep a cool head about themselves and the combination of the two results in feeling like he can’t move.

The whoop of an even louder klaxon startles out of place, and he turns to run. The guards have Walsh, who’s still yelling at him to go, first in Reptilian and then in something that he doesn’t understand for a second before realizing that it’s English. 

“I’ll come back for you,” Ozzie shouts. 

“No!” Walsh says. “Go - you promised!”

“I’ll come back,” he says, again, before turning to run. “I’ll make it back for you - trust me.” 

From there, he tries to mentally recreate every diagram he’d studied of the building. The constant seismic activity means that there are soft-sided service tunnels everywhere, and he leaps into the nearest one, sliding down it, then exiting out into a corridor. He picks another, goes in, then sheds the outer layer of what he’d been wearing, doubling back, before ducking into another. He loses track of where he’s going, focused only on ‘down’ and ‘out,’ and he pauses to pull on a spare set of prosthetics over his hands, to pull on the mask Walsh had given him.

He leaves the building through the main entrance, trying not to look conspicuous, trying not to run. Their ship is in a nearby lot, and Ozzie could escape then - could use the access codes to obtain permission to go into orbit, could rendezvous with the ship containing his body, his real body, could be back to Earth in three days, more or less.

He considers if he goes back, what the group will say; if they’ll mourn Walsh, if anyone would other than him. 

He can’t get back into the building - even with the prosthetics, it’s too risky. And he doesn’t know where they’ll keep Walsh, though he can speculate - if he’s still alive. He has to be. Ozzie has to believe that he is. 

What Ozzie needs is a distraction. A big one. One that’ll have every Reptilian running to save themselves. One that’ll make it easy to walk in, get Walsh, and exit, pursued by no one. A massive distraction. A mountain-sized one. 

 

In the end, inducing an earthquake - a Reptilia-quake - is both the hardest and easiest thing Ozzie’s ever done. The capital is on an old mountain, a beast so large and calcified that Ozzie had barely been able to see it breathing. The one next to it is younger, and he rousts it by very nearly crashing their ship into it - and missing, only to do it again.

In a normal year, buzzing a living mountain to irritate it into inducing an earthquake would be, clearly, the most exciting, most terrifying, most awesome thing he’d ever done. But on an alien planet, in another organism’s body and with Walsh still captured, it’s top five, but less remarkable by comparison. 

He’s not a good pilot - he’s not a good driver, and flying is a lot like driving, except if he miscalculates, he won’t just hit a deer. Or an imaginary deer. The ship wobbles and spins and sputters and he thinks it has an annoyingly high-pitched alarm when he realizes that it’s the sound of his own screaming. 

If he gets back to Earth - if they get back to Earth - he’s never going to drive again. He’ll get the best balaclava money, specifically Walsh’s money, can buy and toodle his fixed gear around town. There’s no real reason to be anywhere in Beacon in a hurry, anyway. 

In the moments he’s not overcome with mortal terror of divebombing an actual living geological formation with a dinky little spaceship, he thinks about what they’ll do when they get back. If he and Walsh will go back to being … whatever the hell they were on Earth. If Walsh will look at him the same way, once he’s returned to his human body, like he wants to say something or do something, but isn’t. If Ozzie will look back.

Ozzie has learned to live with regret - that he took so long to realize that the members of Star-Crossed weren’t crazy. Or totally crazy. That he hadn’t forgiven his parents for being human. And now, this latest regret: not for something he said, but for what he didn’t say. 

He has another chance, though, and he plans to take it. 

Getting back into the building is easier when everyone else seems determined to be fleeing from it. 

They have Walsh, predictably, in the secret division. He goes door-to-door, but none have anything that could conceivably be Walsh. The last door has a clear panel, a set of locks Ozzie ignores for the more expedient measure of smashing the clear polymer panel and opening the door from the inside. 

There are two beds in the room. One is empty, caped in a sheet, the panel under it still glowing warmly enough that Ozzie can see it emit heat.

There’s someone - a _body_ he thinks and immediately regrets - on the other one.

It’s covered, a piece of cloth that’s not rising or falling with breath circulated through capacious lungs, a heat signature that matches the warmth of the slab below it, and Ozzie knows, in that second that -

He peels back the cloth, and it takes him a second to recognize Walsh. They hadn’t peeled off his disguise, but it’s him and he’s dead. Walsh is dead. Walsh is dead, and on a slab and cool to the touch, and Walsh is dead. Ozzie doesn’t cry, if only because of the shock of it. 

“I moved a mountain for you,” he says, picking up Walsh’s hand in his own. He’s dead, and Ozzie’s wearing the stupid gloves over his hands and he doesn’t press their palms together or do anything other than hold Walsh’s limp, cold hand in his own, like he would any another human’s. “I moved a mountain for you, and you’re dead. You’re not supposed to be. This isn’t - We were supposed to go back together. To Earth. To the group. To Kelly and Richard and Gina and Gerry and Yvonne and all of them. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I wasn’t supposed to be alone. You were always there.”

He is crying now, and he doesn’t know if Reptilians can cry or if this is some special ability that only he has as a human living in a Reptilian’s body.

He has to go. The building is shaking, and there’s no telling if or when it will collapse. He has to go. He has to leave Walsh here, Walsh’s body, and if he’d been thinking, at all, he’d have arrived with some way of preserving his consciousness, of transporting him back - of giving Walsh the body he’s wearing after he gets back into his. Of doing something, _anything_ to save him.

“I’m sorry,” he says, not in Reptilian, but in English and it feels strange to say, ‘r’s rough against his third palate. “Walsh, I’m so sorry.” He brings Walsh’s hand up to his face and presses a kiss, not to it, but to the skin above his wrist, his pulseless forearm. 

He turns to leave, navigating through the room slowly, cautious that any movement could send him tumbling to the floor, that if he hits his head or gets caught, it’s likely he’ll die here too.

He’s at the door, and he doesn’t look back - he can’t bring himself to - but he pauses, just for a second. To commit this moment to memory. To tell himself that, when he gets his body back, his life back, he’ll make Walsh’s sacrifice worth it. That he’ll save the Earth if it’s the last thing he does. 

He presses his eyes shut and steels himself for his escape. Which is why he almost doesn’t hear Walsh wake up.

Or not wake up - come back to life.

A gulp of inhaled breath, a clang of his limbs against the slab, a groggy sounding “Mmmph,” followed by “Ozzie?” and Walsh is alive, and Ozzie doesn’t wait before running back to him. 

“The building’s shaking,” Walsh says.

“I, uh,” Ozzie says, looking down at Walsh, hand cupping his face. “I might have caused a small earthquake. I might have woken up a mountain.” 

“Of course you did,” Walsh says, smiling, fluorescent and encompassing and _alive_. 

“We should get out of here.”

“Give me a sec. Death is apparently hard on the body.” Walsh sits up, or tries to, and he pauses halfway to lean heavily on one arm. He grunts in pain, muttering something about feeling like he just did Crossfit. 

Ozzie leans over to put his arm under his, and then reconsiders for a second, overcome with adrenaline, if he has that, the feeling of three hearts beating percussively, the feeling that if he doesn’t act now, with a building collapsing around them, on a harsh and strange alien world, he might never.

He kisses Walsh, not a Reptilian kiss, though Walsh’s hand goes to Ozzie’s shoulder, his grip twisting Ozzie’s shirt, but an Earth kiss, a human one, lips pressing together, careful of sharp Reptilian teeth, a little desperate. 

It’s good, it’s good, and it makes Ozzie want to do it again, to take Walsh’s hand in his, to see what this will be like when he’s returned to his body, his real body, if Walsh will look at him with the same hunger, eyes glowing yellow. He suspects he will. 

The building gives another lurch, one that even the pliancy of the walls can’t accommodate, and Ozzie didn’t come here so they could both die in the rubble.

“Let’s go,” he says, and he loops his arm across Walsh’s shoulders. “Can you walk?”

“Slowly,” Walsh says.

“OK,” Ozzie says, and they walk out together as the world moves around them. 

 

Ozzie isn’t dead, again, and it’s a testament to his year that it’s the first thing he checks for when he wakes up. He’s not alone, either, Walsh sitting beside him, in the medical bay of their ship as they head back to Earth. 

Ozzie isn’t dead, but he feels like he’s been through 10 rounds of a fight - his joints hurt and his muscles hurt and his skin hurts and, hey, he’s back into his body, his real body. He’s never been so happy to see his own toes or the damp skin of the bend in his arms or any of the other thousand places his never thought he’d miss. 

“It worked,” he says, and his voice sounds like someone took sandpaper to his vocal cords. 

“The replicator tried to make ice chips,” Walsh says, and hands him a container of what turns out to be banana sorbet. “I think it missed.”

Still groggy from the meds, it takes Ozzie a minute to notice that Walsh has his mask back on - his human one, with his same stupid floppy hair and dazzle of impossible Reptilian teeth. 

“You’re … ” he starts. But it really does hurt to talk, like he might split his lip if he tries, and so he just waves a vague hand at Walsh.

“Yeah,” Walsh says. “Feels right, you know. Or maybe not right. Better. Just more like me.” He fiddles with a dial that controls an IV, which begins delivering something that makes Ozzie feel warm and cradled, his problems as distant as stars.

“I like you like that,” he mumbles, and before he goes back to sleep, he can feel Walsh press his lips to his forehead.

“Me too,” Walsh says, and then Ozzie is asleep. 

He wakes up later, a little less disoriented than before, a little more like he’s settled back into himself, like his consciousness has found its way back into its old warrens and hiding places, seeping into him. 

He thinks it’s a trick of the light, then, that he can see heat around Walsh, flickering from under his mask and clothing, a halo that doesn’t seem to be around any of the other objects in the room.

“You’re glowing,” Ozzie says, because he is.

“Can you see -” Walsh says, and he moves his hand, trailing light after it. “You can see that?”

“Yeah,” Ozzie says. “Looks like.” But he brings his own hand up, and he looks normal, no heat signature, even though he must be back to normal temperature, practically sweating in the warmth of the ship. “Huh. Guess it only works for Reptilians.” 

“You can see me under all this?” Walsh says, gesturing to the mask, his hoodie and jacket.

Ozzie nods. “It’s pretty faint but … yeah. Must be some kind of side effect of the transfer.” 

There’s a video screen opposite the bed where he’s lying. It has to be playing a recording because they’re miles - light-years - from anything being broadcast, folding and unfolding space and time until they returned to Earth. Until Ozzie goes home. He’s looking forward to it. 

The program is some kind of Reptilian melodrama, political intrigue and at least one kicking fight. The scene then cuts to two Reptilians sitting, one trailing their fingers across the other’s palm, each of them glowing with a faint heated aura. 

“Can you not see that?” Ozzie asks, pointing to the screen. 

“I can,” Walsh says. “But if you put on Westworld, they’d look like that too.” He gets up and starts pacing, occasionally running his hand through his hair, which Ozzie can admit now that he missed. “Humans are really warm,” Walsh says, though it sounds affectionate, particularly when he pauses to give Ozzie’s shoulder a gentle squeeze that only aches a little. “Like you’re made of warm blobs all the time.”

“Thanks?” Ozzie says. 

Walsh leans in and kisses him, once, on the cheek, before continuing. “But you can only see Reptilians, right? So, that means, you’re like - we can use you as a Reptilian-detector. See who is or isn’t. Much better than just cutting people to see if their blood is acid, which was gonna be inefficient.”

“So we could … we could find the others, right? The ones who’ve been in hiding. And, you know, save the planet?” 

“We could, Ozzie,” Walsh says, smiling, eyes shifting from brown to yellow and back. “We definitely could.”


End file.
